July 12, 1999
One-click buying makes online world spin a little faster
You'll be hearing more and more about one-click purchasing during the coming months as it rapidly becomes the year's hot topic for retail Internet commerce.
Net retailers are starting to realize that potential customers often don't make it as far as the virtual checkout line -- they fill their online shopping carts with products, then simply abandon them.
Abandoned shopping carts don't block sidewalks on the Internet the way they do in my neighborhood, but they're still a tantalizing problem. Why do consumers get so close to purchasing something and then just walk away?
Some possible reasons are that it's too hard to figure out how to pay for stuff; it takes too many steps to make a purchase; long forms are off-putting; and finally, shipping, handling, and tax charges often aren't revealed until checkout time, and are occasionally so high that they make customers reconsider their purchases.
Faced with these problems, it's no surprise that retailers have been eyeing Amazon.com's 1-Click purchases with envy for some time now. Fortunately for them, there are alternatives to the shopping cart.
Leading the charge, so to speak, are wallet vendors such as eWallet (www.ewallet.com) and Microsoft's forthcoming Passport technology. Unlike the wallet in your pocket, these products don't store value -- instead, they store information, such as your shipping address and credit card information.
When you make a purchase on a compatible retail site, the digital wallet transmits the needed information to the site, saving you the hassle of filling out forms.
Related services are Qpass (www.qpass.com) and 1ClickCharge (www.oneclickcharge.com), which offer single-click purchasing of digital content, such as Wall Street Journal Interactive stories.
The problem with most electronic wallets is that they require consumers to install software on their PCs. This is not only inconvenient, but it also means you must always use the same PC to make your purchases, or else lose the benefits of the wallet.
A better alternative may be server-side e-wallets, such as those offered by start-up company Brodia.com (www.brodia.com). Here's the catch: You need to entrust your information to a third party -- and what guarantees do you have that this third party won't abuse your personal information?
Brodia.com is seeking to allay such fears and ally itself with consumers by offering spam protection and privacy guarantees along with its basic service.
More problematic for the e-wallet industry is the fact that no wallet is universally compatible with every single online vendor. To address that problem, a consortium of vendors cooked up the awkwardly named Electronic Commerce Markup Language, or ECML, which made its debut last month.
ECML is a standard for encoding and transmitting purchasing information, which should make it easier to get e-wallets and merchant sites working together.
Of course, it's quite possible that Microsoft will make Passport ECML-compatible, build it into Internet Explorer, and integrate it with a server-side data store to enable consumers to access their data from anywhere.
If that happens, the other wallet vendors will go out of business, online merchants will go gaga over IE's built-in "Click to purchase" button, and consumers will be a few steps closer to true convenience in online buying.
Does Microsoft have its hands on your e-wallet? Write to me at dylan@infoworld.com.
Dylan Tweney is the content development manager for InfoWorld Electric. He has been writing about the Internet since 1993.
Previous columns by Dylan Tweney
Web applications often fail to scale, much to the chagrin of CEOs
July 5, 1999
PC industry shows that you can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear
June 28, 1999
RosettaNet decodes the long-lost secrets of internetworking
June 21, 1999
Clueless banks are spelling opportunity for online start-ups
June 14, 1999
Every column since August, 1997
